The iBook Modification Project

As you may remember, Apple officially discontinued the LCD cable needed for this upgrade, so you can't find it through certified reseller or repair channels any longer. You may be able to find the cable on eBay, or you can solder the wires from the original cable directly to the pins on the LCD connection of the XGA Samsung LCD.

I remember that someone did this when the project originally got underway, but I can't remember who it is - if that person still reads this community, please feel free to post some photos of the work you did, so that others can use it for the project. I can host photos if necessary.

Thanks!

I have a 12" XGA LCD from a 500MHz iBook G3 for sale. It's in pristine condition. I'd like to get $60 shipped for it, but I'll entertain offers.

Hey! I see you had the forum posting for the 1024x768 clamshell hack closed at macnn.com. Glad to see you've persisted the info here.

I was researching something unrelated and saw that the method used to trick OSX with that process reminded me of this project. This new process doesn't give us any more features than we've already uncovered, but it does make implementing the old process MUCH easier. In fact, you don't even have to go into open firmware to do it.

As you recall, we were programming the nvramrc area with commands to trick OSX into thinking we had a different card/display installed, thus allowing 1024x768 resolution. I found that typing those nvramrc commands into the boot-command variable achieved the same result. There are only a few open firmware variables available to change from within OSX, luckily, boot-command is one of them.

1) reboot your clamshell holding down opt+cmd+p+r to reset open firmware and erase the nvramrc method.
2) boot into osx (I have osx on an external fw drive. Since we just reset OF, the boot-device is reset as well. So you may have to hold down the opt key during boot to allow the selection of the proper drive/partition to load osx.)
3) open up teminal and type the following (hitting enter at the end of each line):

*edit: I just realized that I'm using 2 and have 1024x768, not 1152x768. See my longer code post below in case the extra variables are why.

4) type in your password and then 'sudo reboot' (without quotes) to reboot
*if you forgot to add mac-boot to the end of it, then when rebooting, open firmware will open up and leave you at the blinking cursor. If that happens, simply type mac-boot and hit return in open firmware to continue on to booting osx. Once in osx, rerun the above command carefully to set it properly.

You should now have the same 1024x768 resolution enjoyed by the whole OF dance of the past. Anytime you want to change things, like for watching a dvd etc., simply keep the above in a text file where you can easily get to it. Open the text file, change the 3 to 2 or vice-versa, then copy/paste it into terminal and reboot. MUCH simpler than playing around with open firmware. I'm sure there's a way to turn this into a clickable apple script so you can just double-click on an icon to change what's entered into the boot-command variable, including automatic rebooting.

I've gone further and played around with changing the card vendorID/deviceID with success and intend on someday finding the elusive holy grail settings. :) I'm sure I can even change the machine model OSX sees from PowerBook2,2 to PowerBook 4,1. If anyone is interested in any of those other paths of frustration...er, I mean fun; if the subsystem-vendor-id and subsystem-id are 0 and the name variable is missing, OSX will go off the vendor-id and device-id only to figure out what the video card is. However, if I omit the name variable, OSX won't boot, so I changed it to what my machine 'thought' the card was whenever I was in holy-grail mode, ATY,RageM3p29s. I haven't touched this machine for a long time, and I'm sure I had changed/removed/bastardized some of the original video kext files. So even though I may successfully change vendor/device IDs, the kext that gets loaded to match has probably been changed by me and isn't working as it should. Your mileage may vary, hopefully for the better. I also don't have any DVD's handily around to check if DVD player works. Core Image and Quartz Extreme are not available with my current settings, so I'm guessing no.

Playing around with video card vendorID, deviceID and name as well as display-family, display-config-info and graphic-options:


Have fun.
-=Randy

It sounds like the LCD cable needed to make this project easy is no longer readily available. Apparently Apple Certified Resellers aren't allowed to keep Mac parts that are more than seven years old - and that cable is apparently past that deadline.

The one store that might have had some, AllMac.com, is out of stock and will be for a long time (I contacted them and checked).

I wish I'd known - I would have bought up as many as I could back when they were still available.

In the meantime, you have one of two options - you can either wait and pay a lot on eBay for one (if you're lucky enough to find one for sale), or you can solder the wires directly to the pins on the LCD's connector. This isn't terribly difficult if you're patient and have a steady hand (the wires are a fairly fine gauge, but it's not unmanageable IMO).

You could also pick up an LCD cable for a different laptop and splice together the wiring from the old clamshell cable.

There are ways around it - none of them are as elegant as using an original cable, of course.

Excellent price on an iBook LCD on eBay...

Check it out here.

I don't know if the cables can be found any longer. There aren't any Apple Certified Resellers where I live now, and I haven't called the place I went to before to find out if they can still order them. Anyone confirm that they're definitely still available?

Alternatives to  Original Apple Airport Card 802.11b are very few. The only direct replacement is even harder to find then the apple card. Sony made the Original Apple Airport Card for Apple, the Sony Part number is PCWA-C150S or ERA-201D1, same card except it has an antenna on the top of it that once unpluged yields an Original Apple Airport Card with Sony labeling.

It's been awhile since I left MacNN, and I think that the people who were harrassing me there are gone for good. Therefore, membership is now unmoderated.

I've yet to acquire an aluminum powerbook keyboard. However, at least some of the keys appear to be swappable.

-Key differences noted in red.
-Ignore the clamshell key. Its erroneous.
-The g3 key appears to be stretched in the image only.

If we look at the differences in the two keyboards, the first thing we notice is the addition of an eject key to the aluminum keyboard. While this was initially discouraging, keep in mind that the aluminum powerbook keyboard does not have the keyboard removal tabs found present in the clamshell. The key clips on the reverse side appear to be a standard design, common between the keys.

I'll be keeping my eyes out for a cheap aluminum keyboard in the near future as this looks at least somewhat promising.

I’ve had a long-held desire to further pimp my Clamshell by adding internal Bluetooth to it. As it stands, I’ve made little progress; I started out by posting a thread on MacNN about it, but it didn’t mirror the success of Shifuimam’s thread about the XGA mod (no-one replied). Since then, it’s somewhat been on the back-burner.

Details of how I planned to carry out the mod can be seen at the above thread. Any input you can offer would be much appreciated. Whilst I think I have a theoretical basis for how to carry it out, I’m still sketchy on some of the details—specifically where to draw power from without killing the USB port. Shifuimam suggested the removing the modem, housing the USB dongle there and drawing power from there, but I’m not sure the wattage would meet USB spec; I’d also like to keep the modem if at all possible…

In the meantime, however, I’ve found a solution to the problem that (almost) fills my exacting requirements: the Interlink Nano USB dongle. It has the benefit of being stupidly small, and also—if I ever take up my internal USB fever again—it will give me a dongle from which to salvage.

Well, this being my first post, I should say hello to everyone...

I found a graphite 466 on craigslist(in another state, through google), and snached it for only $100 with shipping...
Worked perfect for the first 2 days, upgraded it to os X 10.2

then I did a stupid thing, I went to install an airport card(an airport extreme actually, only after did I find out it wasnt even compatable) and the only thing I can think of is I forgot to unplug it first.

now its almost like it isnt even plugged in, the green/orange light on the a/c still comes on, but when i press the power button I dont even get the chime, the only thing that happens is the speaker makes a lil(barely audable) pop sound.

I opened it up, cant see any char marks anywhere on the board, the only thing I noticed is some of the pins on the airport slot were bent and touching eachother... (now already fixed, still nothing)

is there anything I can do to save this board?

Spent a bit of time talking on AIM to someone who found this community via Google.

It sounds very likely that the cards that I have are not WaveLan Silver cards, but rather are relabeled Lucent WaveLan Bronze cards.

This was one of the first IEEE 802.11-compliant wireless cards that Lucent produced (they originally actually had some cards that worked on a 900MHz band, before the 802.11 standard was ratified). Unfortunately, they are severely limited - they have a bandwidth cap of only 2Mbps, and support no encrpytion at all (although I saw something in a newsgroup archive indicating that it may be possible to get these to work with 40-bit WEP).

If such is the case, then it may not be worth my time to try and do anything more with these, and I'm probably just going to sell them off. I'm going to try this IOexperts driver as a last resort, and then I suppose I'm just going to try to offload these on eBay. I don't know that I can get much detail on the specs in Windows, in order to confirm whether or not they do only work at 2mbps. I'll see if I can find some other details in the FCC papers on the hardware.

What is everyone else doing with their iBooks? Any other mod projects in the works?

ibech, if you do try to add FireWire to a 300MHz board, definitely post about your experiences!

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[update]
After some careful perusal of the FCC documentation for this card, it's definitely a WaveLAN Bronze. Which means no WEP and really shitty performance (2Mbps? That's slower than USB 1.1!). From the looks of it, the speed is a hardware limitation. Psion Teklogix revised this card twice, and from a look at the last revision (in 2002 - this card is from 1999, btw), those are indeed 802.11b 11Mbps cards, which would probably identify to an iBook as Airport cards. However, I haven't seen any of those for sale on eBay.

I'm just hoping I can get my $55 back that I spent on these. :(

Ah, well. You never know until you try!
[/update]

Our little community has been dead as of late, so here are some updates for you to ponder.

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The wireless card project

I have since been able to get one of these cards onto a completely open access point, but they still will not work with my real wireless network (no SSID broadcast, 128-bit WEP). I've got another laptop that I'm going to try them on (I think the default image on my work laptop might be causing problems or a hardware conflict somewhere). This is all in Windows XP.

After buying a lot of iBook parts from acorder on MacNN, I've assembled a 500MHz 12" iBook G3, and popped one of these cards in there. I did incremental OS updates, since the stuff he sent came with 10.0 and 10.1 discs, and I already had 10.2 and 10.3 discs, plus a 10.4 DVD I used with a FireWire enclosure.

10.0 has no Airport support, so I updated to 10.1. That saw the Airport card relatively quickly (it sometimes takes a minute for OS X to realize there's a card installed, unlike with a real Airport card where it's immediate), but I couldn't connect to anything. Updating to 10.3 (I got annoyed and skipped the 10.2 upgrade) hasn't seemed to change anything. However...doing a clean install of 10.4 kills the card entirely. It's not recognized at all. Now, I'm going to assume that Tiger still has support for original Airport cards, since it does indeed work on G3 hardware, which all used original Airport cards. At any rate, that's as far as I've gotten since my last post. My offer still stands to send one of these out to anyone who will give me $11 for one!

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FireWire on a 300MHz board

koralatov tipped me off to an interesting website on fixing a busted USB port in a 300MHz iBook. It's in French, but you can get the gist of it from the images... check out the site here.

The picture we're really interested in in this one:



The white arrow is pointing to a set of six dots on the motherboard that could lead one to think they may be related to FireWire. USB uses four connections - two for data (in and out), and two for power (positive and negative). FireWire, on the other hand, uses six (and this is why you can't easily convert between USB and FW, btw) - four for data (twisted pairs for in and out), and two for power (positive and negative).

I haven't cracked open my own 466MHz tangerine to take a look at this and see if my board has similar connections for the FW port, but it might be worth investigating the possibility of adding FireWire to a 300MHz iBook. This would significantly increase the usability of those models, since it enables things like target disk mode, booting off external enclosures, and enabling high-speed data transfer from enclosures and older iPods. If we can use NVRAM to trick the iBook into displaying XGA, I would imagine it might be possible to do something similar to make it see a FireWire port...

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In the meantime, I'm also going to have a few laptops up for sale. Head over to this entry on my personal journal if you're interested in a 300MHz clamshell or a 12" white G3 model.

What are all of you doing with your iBooks? Any mod projects come to mind? Any ideas we haven't explored yet?

Hello to everybody!
This is a really sad evening with sad news. But I think its important for all you modders to know.
When I came home I was curios to check out the ibook av cable I got today. (I also did this terrific lcd modding to my 466 graphite clamshell some weeks ago.)
What I did not try until tonight was setting display-family to 2 to use the apple dvd-player.
Well, tonight I did.
And this wasnt good at all. When I typed "reset-all" at last the screen stayed black. 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes. I switched off the computer then and until now I am not able to boot whether into OF, reset PRAM or NVRAM. I pressed the keys for ages. The ibook doesn`t boot at all, just the chime comes. There is no CD-Boot anymore, no firewire target connection and I am afraid not even a connection to the keyboard. Something must have been crashing the OF:-((((((

I took out the battery now and will leave the computer completely without power for some days. Maybe this helps to clear the nvram.
Somebody knows another trick?

PLEAAAASE, be careful with the settings in the OF! Everything you do here is written into the BootRom of the computer and once its too messed up to find its way........
~
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2 days later: Still sad:-(

Tried to boot up the poor book. Nothing happens. I wish I had cleared the nvram before switching it to display family 2.
I will always reset the pram now before I switch to any display-families. Yes yes yes.

BTW I am going to take apart the poor thing soon and accurately compare the board to a 366mhz 8vram board to find the differences. It has the same processor -but probably some different resistors??

The suggested method for applying the XGA firmware hack seems to leave brightness control intact. However, on some occasions (for reasons as yet unknown), applying the OF edit seems to remove the ability to change the brightness using the F1 and F2 keys. In this instance, it's possible to solve the issue with one of two methods:

1. Reset the firmware to its default condition, and then reapply it. It's not entirely clear why this works, but it seems to solve the problem;
2. If the above fails to work, you could try the brightness fix suggested by Baxter Brittle in his Hi-Def PowerBook mod. Whilst it's not directly applicable (you will have to substitute your display's model number for the one he uses in the example), it should work.

For convenience's sake, and just in case the page is removed/goes down, the pertinent information is below:

1. Open display prefs
2. Click on "Color" tab
3. Click "Open Profile"
4. Scroll right down to the very bottom and find "Apple display make and model information"
5. Note down Manufacturer and Model ID's
6. Then go to System/Library/Displays/Overrides/DisplayVendorID-610
7. Find file DisplayProductID-9c20 - this is the file for the standard display
8. Copy file to desktop
9. Rename file based on figures given from you're open color pro file in my case 139f so the new file should be called DisplayProductID-139f
10. Go back to System/Library/Displays/Overrides/ and see if there is a folder called DisplayVendorID-xxx (In my case 4d10). If there is not create one on the desktop
11. Then copy your new file into your new folder and copy the folder into System/Library/Displays/Overrides/
12. Reboot and you should have brightness control. You will lose some of you intermediate resolutions but you'll still have 1920 x 1200!

I purchased a lot of Lucent WaveLan 802.11-compliant PCMCIA wireless cards off eBay several months ago. I'm not sure how to get them working, though.

I've gotten as far as flashing the cards with the latest firmware from Lucent, as well as upgrading them to be WaveLan Gold cards, so they have 128-bit WEP support. If I plug the card into a Windows laptop and attach an external antenna, the zeroconf wireless utility built into Windows sees available access points, but can't connect. OS X on my extra clamshell identifies the card as an Airport card, but is unable to connect to a wireless network.

I checked the FCC ID online (the FCC ID is GM3WLPC24; go here to search for the documents associated with this hardware), and the cards are registered for the 2.5GHz band, so I know that they're 802.11b.

So here's my proposition to anyone interested: If you're willing to temporarily part with $11, PayPal me and I'll mail you one of these cards. If you can figure out how to make OS X see these things as Airport cards, I'll refund your $11 and the card is yours to keep - the others I'll sell on eBay and hopefully make a small profit (I paid $55 shipped for the lot of five, and I'm hoping to get around $45 shipped out of each if we can make them work as Airport cards).

The software for upgrading the cards to the latest firmware is here. The DOS application required to make the cards appear as WaveLan Gold and therefore have 128-bit WEP support can be found here. Both applications only work under Windows.

For reference, here's what the card looks like (click for the Flickr page and full-size photo):



And for comparison, what the label on a standard Lucent ORiNOCO WaveLan Silver PCMCIA card looks like:



If anyone's interested in helping out with this, just leave a comment!

At this time, DVD playback doesn't work when display-family is set to 3. It will work on a TV if you mirror your display on a television, but it outputs audio with a black screen when trying to play DVDs on the iBook LCD itself.

Until we can find a better solution, you can use the following NVRAM edit to work around this problem. This edit will set the display to 1152x768, which will cut off ~60 pixels on the right in full screen mode, but at least allow playback.


Hit Ctrl+C to quit the NVRAM editor.


You can then set display-family to 3 when you want to go back to 1024x768.

If anyone knows how to apply firmware edits from inside OS X, please give us some input! It would be great to be able to make these changes without having to reboot.

What you need for the LCD upgrade project:
This is a list of components known to work. You may try other parts if you like.

1. LG display data cable, Apple part #922-5368. You can order one of these through your local certified Apple resale/repair shop - go to Apple.com to find one near you. This part has officially been discontinued by Apple and all remaining stock at official resale and repair locations has been discarded. You will need to look for this cable elsehwere - eBay is probably a good start. You can also solder the wires from the original cable to the pins on the Samsung LCD's display connector.
2. 12" Samsung LCD from an Apple laptop, model number LTN121X1-L02. The Philips LG LP121X04 is also known to work. These are confirmed to be found in 12" G3 and G4 white iBooks. Nobody's pulled one from a 12" PowerBook, but we're pretty sure it's the same model.
3. 466Mhz clamshell logic board - these are the only boards with the upgraded 8MB ATI video chip that is known to output 1024x768 (XGA) resolution. Older boards (300 and 366MHz) may or may not work. The 466Mhz boards were only in the DVD-capable graphite and key lime clamshells.
4. Latest firmware update - this is necessary for the resolution hack to work! You should be able to download from Apple's website. Don't ask me how to update it - I don't know, since my iBook had the latest firmware when I bought it on eBay.

How to actually do the firmware edit:

Hold down Cmd+Opt+O+F and boot up your computer. This will open up the Open Firmware (OF) console.

Type in the following commands (new line means hit enter). Make certain you're typing it in correctly - a missed keystroke could render your computer unusable (maybe). Just be careful.


Hit Ctrl+C to quit the NVRAM editor.


You should have working XGA resolution now. If you don't, PLEASE at least take a quick look at pages 6 and 7 of this thread for possible troubleshooting tips. Still having trouble? Post as many details as you can so we can help you!

If you think you've messed up the NVRAM edits at all, hold down Cmd+Option+P+R to reset the PRAM entirely. This will remove all NVRAM edits and the code that directs Open Firmware to use the custom NVRAM file when booting.

Welcome to ibookmod. This is a continuation of a project that was started in August 2006 on the Macnn.com forums. You can see the original thread here:

http://forums.macnn.com/73/mac-modification/305763/clamshell-ibook-questions-lcd-cd-logic/

I'll be moving over relevant project information over the next few days. Feel free to join the community and join in furthering this project (and other projects that may arise)!

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If you're new to LiveJournal, you just need to create an account to post in this community. Create a new LiveJournal account here.

Then you need to join this community. There is a link provided on the navigation strip on the main community page (ibookmod):



Once you're logged in, click the "Join this community" link to request membership. The community maintainer(s) will be notified and approve or deny your membership. Membership will only be denied if it's apparent that you're a troll from another website.

Once you've done that, posting to the community is easy - just navigate to the main community page (ibookmod) after you've logged in. Again, there's a link on the navigation strip at the top of the main page:



Just click the link that says "Post to this community" and you're ready to post an entry.

You can comment on entries, similar to replying to threads in a traditional message forum. Comments are threaded, too, which allows for better organization. IP addresses are logged, and comments from non-members will be screened to prevent spam and/or trolling. You don't need to use the comments feature of existing entries if you have a new problem or a new mod project - use the comments to help with existing problems or projects.

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To put code in your entry (e.g. NVRAM edits), use the following code in your post (make sure you are using the HTML editor, not the WYSIWYG "Rich Text" editor, if you are posting from the LiveJournal website):

<div style="padding: 5px; margin: 0 0 0 10px; background-color: #f1f1f1; font-family: consolas, monospace; border: 1px dashed #ccc;">code here</div>

You can use standard HTML tags to customize your posts. You can also use inline CSS with DIVs or SPANs to format the display of your text. Don't do any annoying or garish formatting - if you do, your posts will be edited to remove it.

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Check back here often for an updated list of posts that are about a specific mod project. You can access this post from the community's profile page at any time.

• Using an XGA (1024x768) LCD in a clamshell iBook (Open Firmware hack method)
• Enabling DVD playback on an OF-modded clamshell iBook